Dolan, Jill
Belle Reprieve: LGBTQ theory into practice
Dolan, Jill, (2010) "Belle Reprieve: LGBTQ theory into practice" from Dolan, Jill, Theatre & sexuality pp.59-80, Basingstoke: Palgrave
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Licensed for use for the course: "DRA020N211A - Critical Frameworks".
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ISBN: 0230220649
I hl'llI rI'
&1 SI'.\.lIlllh)r
_
off Washington Square in Greenwich Village hefore he
successfully expanded his career by writing comedy for
heterosexual performers and mainstream audiences.
Other drag artists chose to remain downtown (literally
and figuratively), as did Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous
Theatrical Company, which parodied high art and other cultural forms for twenty years at its Sheridan Square location in
the Village. Ludlam and his business and life partner Everett
Quinton regularly served up biting satires of sexual and social
mores, queering melodramas such as Camille (Ridiculous
Theatrical Company, New York, 1973) and a host of other
genre conventions, as in the penny-dreadful, Gothic parody
The Mystery if Irma Vep (Ridiculous Theatrical Company,
New York, 1984), long a favourite on the regional theatre
circuit. Ludlam performed in drag, but his costumes never
completely hid his gender; he played Camille with his curly
chest hair bristling purposefully out of his hodice. Ludlam
wrote twenty-nine plays, all of which were produced at his
theatre, and most of which he starred in and directed. His
work, like much campy queer theatre, attracted a coterie
crowd to his small basement theatre, but his plays' wit and
intelligence and his performances' energy and charisma won
him notoriety and respect far beyond the avant-garde.
Kiki and Herb began their own campy, gender-bending
drag performances in San Francisco in the late 1980s, before
moving to small Greenwich Village spaces such as the restaurant/har the Cowgirl Hall of Fame and eventually to
trendier cluhs such as the Fez, on Manhattan's Lower East
Side, in the late 1990s. They moved off Broadway to the
58
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...
_. - - -
-
Cherry Lane Theatre to ply their unique theatrical pairing
in a louche lounge act called Kiki and Herb: Coup de Tbéiitre
(2003) that attracted larger, mixed audiences. Kiki (singer
Justin Bond) is an elderly, past-her-prime torch singer,
and Herb (musician Kenny Mellman) is her long-suffering
accompanist. Although the thirty-something-year-old performers use no theatrical make-up to create age effects,
they say that their characters are both over seventy years
old. Their lounge act provides the occasion for stark commentary on the political moment, seasoned with fictional
but strikingly realistic-sounding, bitter but poignant reminiscences from Kiki's constructed life that take on an eerie,
sometimes hostile tone. What begins as light banter with
her audience often descends into Kiki shrieking in anger, as
Herb tries to follow along gamely on his keyboard. In 2007,
Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway (Helen Hayes Theatre,
New York, 2006) was nominated for a Tony Award for Best
Special Theatrical Event, rather an understatement considering how unusual the pair would be on Broadway.
Belle Reprieve: LGBTQtheory
into practice
puts theory and practice into conversation,
as the play exemplifies the themes described in Theatre &...
Sexuality. In ]991, at London's Drill Hall, Lois Weaver and
Peggy Shaw, of the US-based Split Britches troupe, and
Bette Bourne and Paul Shaw, of the UK-based Bloolips,
collaborated on a queer 'deconstruction'
of Tennessee
Williams' canonical play A Streetcar Named Desire. Written
and produced on Broadway in ]947, Streetcar became a
Belle Reprieve
59
.h(·otl·(· &S('XIIIIU.),
'
~_
'masterpiece' of American theatre. It won the Pulitz r
Prize for Drama, ran for two years, and was made into a
1951 film directed by Elia Kazan starring Vivian Leigh,
Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, and Marlon Brando. The play
and the film exemplified the Method acting popular at the
time, which strictly observes the conventions of fourth-wall
realism and requires actors to access their characters and
execute their roles with psychological, interior techniques.
Since its debut, Streetcar has been taught in high schools and
colleges around the world, perpetuating its international
canonical status,
Williams' play takes place in a steamy, working-class
apartment in New Orleans, where Stella lives with Stanl y,
her brute, emotionally inarticulate but physically and Sexually powerful husband. Stella comes from upper-class
Southern stock but turns her back on what was once a privileged existence when the family's estate, Belle Rêve (French
for 'beautiful dream'), falls into disrepair and her relatives
begin to die off. Leaving her older sister, Blanche, to contend with ageing relatives on the dilapidated estate, Stella
moves to New Orleans, where she's entranced by Stanley's
rough allure. When Blanche arrives in their small, ramshackle apartment unannounced, the clash between the sisters' former wealth and their current poverty creates sharp
tensions between Blanche and Stanley,
Blanche disparages Stanley for his Polish ethnicity and
his working-cla s manners and struts about his apartment putting on exaggerated airs, The frustrated Stanley
digs into Blanche's past and learns that her snobbish façade
60
---~---------------_.~--~-conceals a more sordid existence. Blanche, it turns out, left
Belle Rêve for a single-room-occupancy hotel, at which she
accepted 'gentleman callers' who paid for her company.
Stanley crushes Blanche's illusions, brutally raping her on
the evening when Stella is taken to the hospital to give birth
to his child. Stella returns to find her sister suffering a psychotic breakdown, her emotional and psychological damage finally beyond repair. In Streetcar's final scene, doctors
arrive from an asylum to take Blanche away, but her illusions return long enough to see the gentleman physician as a
suitor come to court her. 'I've always relied on the kindness
of strangers,' she famously remarks, as she takes his arm and
is led out of Stanley's and Stella's lives.
Marlon Brando played Stanley on Broadway and in
the film, becoming famous for his torn T-shirt, rippling
muscles, and mumbling delivery of dialogue punctuated
with echoing cries of 'Stella!!' as he called for his wife's
ministrations. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Brando
epitomized American masculinity as the working-class stiff
who proved himself with his muscles and his wits, surrounded himself with buddies in a tightly knit homosocial
community, and expected his woman to service and sate
his sexual needs. Against Brando's iconic white American
manhood, Vivian Leigh played Blanche as a fading blonde
beauty, just short of a caricature of fragile, mid-century
white American womanhood taken to its hapless and helpless extreme. Their climactic confrontation remains one
of tbe most famous scenes in theatre history, a date with
destiny that exemplifies the triumph of masculinity over
61
thc',11 rc' &SC'XIIIIHty
_
what Williams portrays as the manipulative wiles of female
seduction.
hallowed place in the canon and its highly
gendered meanings made it perfect for queer parody. Bell«
Reprieve appropriated the original to make its own case for
gender performativity and theatre's complicity in inculcating conservative ideology about sexuality. Although the
collaboration follows Streetcar's basic plot, its vaudevillian
form refuses to observe realist conventions. Instead, the four
performers directly address the audience and don't even try
to maintain the illusions of character. The scenery is twodimensional, painted on cardboard flats that don't pretend
to evoke a real 1940s apartment in New Orleans and instead
refer to it in a critical, historical, Brechtian manner. Rather
than using realistic dialogue, the characters often speak
past one another, fOllowing two or three different narrative
tracks simultaneously and interspersing their monologues
with songs. Although each performer plays a character from
Williams' original, they 'quote' their roles rather than fully
taking on the character's psychological baggage or trying to
conjure the character for the audience through emotional
acting techniques. Belle Reprieve, in fact, is an exemplary
post-modernist and Brechtian play and production that
revels in revealing the operations of theatre and in its refusal
to observe narrative unity or realist convention.
Streetcar's
The actors' deconstruction of the original characters
is evident from the cast list. Mitch (played by Paul Shaw) _
Blanche's innocent, square suitor in the original_ is 'a fairy
disguised as a man' (Case, Split Britches, 1996, p. 150). The
62
-'--~---- ~-_ _.--------..
_.
---- ---~
-- --------
suggestion that Mitch is 'disguised as a man' refers to the
common stereotype that gay men aren't real men, a slur
that Belle Reprieve plays with and takes to a comic extreme.
Likewise, Stella (played by Weaver) is 'a woman disguised as a
woman' (p. 150), indicating that even an actor whose gend r
coincides with her character's sex is also masquerading rather
than playing a role that's innate, natural, or true. Stanley is
'a butch lesbian' (played by Peggy Shaw, no relation to Paul).
The troupe doesn't saythat Stanley is played by a butch lesbian;
Stanley, in this reading, is a butch lesbian. This claim allows
spectators to detach his behaviour from common presumptions about masculinity being innate to men.
Instead, we see how masculinity plays, as a performance, on Peggy Shaw's body. Shaw doesn't hide the fact
that she's a woman as she plays Stanley. Instead, she adopts
the iconic masculinity he represents and plays it to the hilt,
encouraging spectators to see that behaviour we consider
masculine is learned, not inevitable, and can be adopted
by anyone. Finally, Blanche is 'a man in a dress' (played by
Bette Bourne, the famed drag queen of the Bloolíps troupe).
Femininity, too, is examined not as a set of innate qualities
that inevitably stem from female anatomy but as a performance that any willing body can construct and parade.
The performativity demonstrated by these character/performer choices carries over into the play's décor. Instead of
cr ating a set typical of domestic realism, which would faithfully represent the unkempt kitchen, bedraggled bedroom,
and cramped bathroom that make up the tiny space in which
Stanley and Stella live, Belle Reprieve presents the setting as
63
.hl·lI.rl·&S(·XIUllity
.
exactly not real from the start. The stage directions indicate
that '[t]he back drop is a scrim [a muslin cloth] painted to
resemble the interior of a 1940s New Orleans apartment' (p.
150). Rather than a real stove, sink, tables, and chairs, Belle
Reprieve's set is a painting, a two-dimensional representation
of a living space. 'Reality' is removed, second order, already
distanced by being painted. The stage directions explain that
'[t]hroughout the play, various painted cloth curtains are
pulled ... to denote a change in scenery or mood' (p. 150).
When the scene shifts to the bathroom, for example, a curtain is pulled on which is painted 'an oversized clawed foot of
a bathtub and a straight razor lying on a tiled floor' (p. 157).
When Stanley and Mitch prepare to play cards, Mitch carries
on a painting of a card table, which he places over one of the
several cardboard boxes used for the set (p. 161).
For the rape scene, 'the bathtub is removed and a painting of an oversized naked light bulb is pulled onstage' (p.
177), once again using two dimensions to signal the arrival
of Blanche's moment of inexorable -truth. These design
choices continually remind spectators that no illusions will
be created here. Instead, the actors play with the 'reality' constructed by Williams' original play, pointing out
through their counter-choices that he, too, selected how to
represent gendered relations in 1947 America. Belle Reprieve
highlights theatre as a system of signification in which reality is obviously constructed and shouldn't be aSSumed to be
natural, innate, or inevitable.
Belle Reprieve's very title plays on Belle Rêve, which in
English productions of Streetcar
64
is typically pronounced
----------* ----_._~------_.~._-----'reev' rather than the French 'rehv'. The collaborators' version is peppered with Williams' dialogue throughout, as if
to ground audiences' understanding in comparisons with
the original. But, for the most part, the cast perform monologues, in counterpoint to dialogue, that have little to do
with the overarching plot but that somehow set the mood
for the ruminations on gender and sexuality that form Belle
Reprieve's core. The play opens with Mitch - the marginalized supporting player in the original - setting up the
production's frame. He wheels on three large boxes, one
of which will serve as Blanche's steamer trunk/hope chest,
the other two carrying actors and transforming into other
pieces of the set. He tells the audience that it's 4 a.m., when
'the thread that holds us to the earth is at its most slender,
and all the creatures that never see sunlight come out to
make mincemeat of well-laid plans' (p. 150).
Rather than providing the exposition of a conventional
realist play, in which the characters' back-stories are presented to set the plot in motion, Mitch creates a mood of
thoughtful reflection on things incongruous with what we
suppose is 'normal'. Four o'clock is a liminal time between
night and day, not quite dawn, when a queer netherworld of
shapes and sounds circulate that don't resolve into sharply
drawn images. Mitch describes '[d]arkness all around. Small
sounds that give a taste of an atmosphere, a head turning, a
body lit from behind, shadows in the dark, tiled hallway, a
blues piano' (p. 150). He creates a tone more reminiscent of
film noir than domestic realism, as if to suggest that underneath what looks like a family drama is a vein of criminality
6.5
íh(,ltire.~"cxulllii.y
...~
~
.
.
_
with a mystery waiting to be solved. Belle Reprieve turns this
into an enigma of gender and sexuality, and reveals how the
crime of enforced and binary gender and compulsory heterosexuality hobbles our imaginations and our lives.
This noir ambiance and revisionary interpretation of
underlying meanings spin out in dialogue that
refuses to unfold in a traditional linear style. After Mitch's
establishing monologue, Stella appears, seductively drinking a bottle of Coke, to address the audience. She asks,
Streetcar's
Is there something you want? What can I do for
you? Do you know who I am, what lfeel, how 1
think? You want my body. My soul, my food, my
bed, my skin, my hands? You want to touch me,
hold me, lick me, smell me, eat me, have me?
You think you need a little more time to decide?
Well, you've got a little over an hour to have
your fill. (p. 150)
She remarks directly on the spectators' act of looking at her,
revealing the existence of the 'gaze' that feminist theorists
have long argu d is gendered male and operates to objectify
the female body. Weaver/Stella addresses spectators' desire
overtly, asking whether they want her, and for what. Like
Mitch, she establishes a time frame, but if he sets the story
at 4 a.m. - a point to which the characters continually refer,
as though time isn't moving at all as the evening proceeds _
Weaver/Stella announces that the production in which she performs will take just over an hour, time enough for spectators
66
__
---~---_.~--_._----_._-----_.•_.__ ._---..---_ ..
._.-
to decide what it is they want from the performers. The desire
that courses between actor and spectator, which usually goes
unremarked, is identified, claimed, and made part of the story
that Belle Reprieve tells.
Within this revised mise en scène, Mitch and Stella
nonetheless know in their bones how the story is supposed
to play out. As Bourne/Blanche and Shaw/Stanley begin
their speeches from inside the boxes Mitch has wheeled
onstage, Stella says, 'I can usually feel it coming ... ' Mitch
responds, 'Isn't there something you can do to stop it happening? ... Change the script!' They continue:
STELLA:Change the script. Ha ha. You want me
to do what in these shoes? The script is not the
problem. I've changed the script .... Look, I'm
supposed to wander around in a state of narcotized sensuality. That's my part. (Blanche
and Stanley speak simultaneously from inside
the two largest boxes.)
BLANCHE:You didn't see, Miss Stella, see what
I saw, the long parade to the graveyard. The
mortgage on the house, death is expensive,
Miss Stella, death is expensive.
STANLEY:Is that so? You don't say, hey Stella
wasn't we happy before she showed up. Didn't
we see those colored lights you and me. Didn't
we see those colored lights.
STELLA:And anyway, it's too late. It's already
started. (p. 151)
67
thcllíre&scxllulUy
"
_
As Blanche and Stanley speak lines lifted from the original play, the wheels of narrative
that place the masculine,
working-class
odds with
constructed,
Stanley at mortal
upper-crust
the carefully
but bitter, desiccating,
Blanche have started turning,
feminine
and both performers
emerge
from their boxes ready to do battle. But because Shaw/Mitch
and Weaver/Stella
have already pointed
at the theatrical
apparatus for the gathered spectators by commenting
on the
inexorable plot and the operation of the gaze, the audience is
alert to how this performance
plays out before them, rather
than watching with the same unthinking
narcotized
pleasur
in which Stella languishes in a typical Streetcar production.
BelIe Reprieve
raids the pantry
of Williams'
uses its staples to cook up an entirely different
Williams
will be present
but 'queered'
depended
on the strangeness
meal. That
is signalled
Blanche's very first line in this production:
literally perverts
play but
of strangers'
(p. 151), which
the original ('I've always depended
kindness of strangers')
by
'I've always
on the
and moves it from Blanche's valedic_
tory speech to her very first. The world of Belle Reprieve is
made strange indeed, but this new cast resignifies
just as the word 'queer'
from its derogatory,
was reclaimed
historically
'strange',
by 19908 activists
damaging connotations.
Belle Reprieve also resignifies territory
and location.
Just
as within the play's world time stays fixed at the Witching
hour of 4 a.m., place, too, is caught in a nether land of queer
import.
When Bourne/Blanche
bursts out of her box in her
first scene, she says, 'Are we here? Is this the place? '" How
sweet it is to arrive at a new place for the first time' (p. 152).
68
-----_._-------------------_
..~--
Stella regretfully informs her, 'Honey, we're in exactly the
same place we started out from.' Blanche complains, 'I
can't stand being in between. I just can't bear it.' Blanche's
words might refer to her position as Williams' character,
whose tragic flaw is her inability to see that she's trapped
by a haunting, immobilizing past. But her words might also
refer to the body of the drag queen who plays Blanche in
Belle Reprieve. Bourne says in an interview,
Who would not want to play Blanche? Yet I
was always very keen to play her as a man in drag,
and not try to be a woman. When I was living
in drag it was very clear that I was a man - I wasn't
passing as a woman .... It was very important
for me to be myself, in other words a man in a
frock - a new idea about a man. I think men look
gr.eat in frocks, and I don't really see that we have
to impersonate women necessarily, soin that sense
I'm not really a Drag Queen. (www.nyu.edu/
classes Ij effreys IGayand Lesbian Per formance I
suellentrop/bloolips.html)
The spectator watching Bourne perform, after all, sees a
person whose male anatomy is covered in female garb, playing at femininity with a body on which it might seem incongruous, given conventional expectations that femininity
lines up neatly with femaleness. Bourne's liminality provides
his pathos but also, finally, his liberation, as through this
step-by-step refusal of realism's inevitable ravages, Bournel
69
.hell'I' &sexulllh)'
_
Blanche avoids the violent, devastating ending Williams
wrote for the character.
Shaw/Stanley and Bourne/Blanche toy with the borders
crossed in Belle Reprieve in a short early scene in which Shaw
plays a guard who insists on seeing Bourne's passport. The
audience has already been told the characters are in the same
place they started; requesting travel documents underlines
the fact that, in this play, 'borders' become metaphorical
and once again refer to gender and appearance rather than
geographical territory. Blanche says, 'Passport? I wasn't
aware we were crossing any borders' (p. 153). Forced to
produce papers, Bourne presents his passport but says his
name is 'Blanche DuBois', which Stanley, playing the border
guard, disputes. Blanche retorts, 'The information in that
document is a convention which allows me to pass in the
world without let or hindrance.' When Stanley says, 'You
don't look anything like this photograph,' Blanche smoothly
responds with a WiJdean epigram: 'I believe nature is there
to be improved upon' (p. 153). The exchange underlines
the fact that Bourne/Blanche refuses to acquiesce to the
naming conveniences of citizenship and improves on nature
with a performance that belies 'manhood' and, by analogy,
'nation'.
Because BelIe Reprieve refuses to take itself seriously,
however, such meanings are playfully implied, while the performers/characters remind spectators that we're here to see
a performance. Irritated with the exchange about passpörts
and borders, Mitch says, 'Look, can't we just scrub 'round
the search and get on with the scenes of brutal humiliation
70
---------_._------------------------------------------------
------
and sexual passion?' (p, 154). Once again, the characters
know what's coming - unlike in realism, in which every
performance attempts to make it look as though the events
are happening for the first time. Belle Reprieve jettisons the
conventional suspension of disbelief and replaces it with a
more canny belief that performance itself can overturn the
deforming ideological message realism usually delivers.
Belle Reprieve's dramaturgy also refuses conventional
dialogue. In Act Two, Blanche ruminates on Stanley's sexuality while Stella simultaneously considers the pleasures of a
good cold bottle of Coca-Cola. Although the two performers share the stage and speak consecutively, their lines don't
refer to one another's thoughts. Instead, they seem to share a
monologue that's moving on two different tracks simultaneously, undermining the import of both speeches. Whereas
Stella's rhapsody on her Coke-drinking might be trivial,
Blanche's debate about Stanley's sexuality is vital, but it is
treated with the same light touch as the Coke question.
In fact, Stanley's realness is questioned throughout the
play. Stella tells her husband, 'You don't satisfy me, you're
not real.' 'Are you saying I'm not a real man?' Stanley blusters (p. 169), even after he's arm-wrestled with Mitch in
a fever pitch of performed masculinity and homoerotic
undertones, and sung the 1955 standard 'I'm a Man' to
prove his virility in the show's performative context. But
the enigma of Stanley's 'true gender' can't be resolved or
expunged, as it most likely would be in conventional realism (see Dolan, '''Lesbian'' Subjectivity in Realism', 1990).
The mystery continues into Belle Reprieve's second act, as
71
jh('llj.rc,l!:
(,Xllllilly
--------
Blanche, the drag queen, soaks in the bathtub ('One day
I'll probably just dissolve in the bath,' she reports. 'They'll
come looking for me, but there'll be nothing left. "Drag
Queen Dissolves in Bathtub", that'll be the headline'
[p. 158]). As Mitch, the fairy, plays the ukulele on a stepladder above her 'tub', Bourne/Blanche says,
[T]here's something about Stanley I can't quite
put my finger on. I can't put my finger on his
smell. I don't believe he's a man. I question his
sexuality. His postures are not real, don't seem
to be coming from a true place. He's a phoney, and he's got her believing it, and if she has
children he'll have them believe it and when
he dies, they'll find out. '" Have you ever seen
him naked? ... The noises he makes, the way he
walks like Mae West, the sensual way he wears
his clothes, this is no garage-mechanic workingclass boy, this is planned behavior. This is calculated sexuality, developed over years of picking
up signals not necessarily genetic is what I'm trying to say. '" [W]hat I'm trying to say is, I think
he's a fag. '" Only someone as skilled as I am at
being a woman can pick up these subtle signs.
(pp. 172-73)
As Blanche ponders, she leads the spectator to expect she
will announce the supposed secret of Stanley's femaleness,
which has in fact always been apparent to the characters, the
72
_---------------------------------performers, and the audience. Instead, Blanche announces
Stanley is a 'fag', pronouncing queer sexuality as the 'open
secret' of Stanley's difference and securing her revelation
by asserting her own skill at 'being a woman', which, obviously, she is not. Bourne/Blanche's comic, elegant undermining of gender's authority derives from the layers of
performance she teases out as constitutive of what we think
we know when we perceive masculinity and femininity.
No end looms in sight in this funhause of many-gendered
mirrors.
Belle Reprievescores its insights into queer performativity and performance with a light touch, using vaudeville
routines that also undermine realism's self-seriousness. In a
set piece towards the end of the first act, Stella and Stanley
rehearse a number reminiscent of the Marx Brothers, who
drew many of their acts from vaudeville and burlesque. An
extended play on 'what's funny' ('Show me what's funny.'
'You want me to show you what's funny.' 'Yeah, show me
funny.' 'Okay, I'll show you funny ... that's funny' [p. 166])
results in Stella ripping each of Stanley's sleeves in turn,
spraying him with bottle of seltzer, and powdering him
with a giant puff. Stanley gets his revenge when Stella is
about to throw a pie in his face and he unexpectedly tips it
into hers instead. This familiar comic routine, embedded
in a rereading of A Streetcar Named Desire, signals that the
four performers will avail themselves of any and all forms of
culture to make their points.
In another burlesque-inspired scene, Shaw/Stanley stops
the proceedings when he sees that Bourne/Blanche has her
73
jhCltire& scxullihy
_
finger up her nose:
STANLEY:Hold it, hold it ... Is there something I
can help you with?
BLANCHE:Please could you give me a tissue. I
think I've got something stuck up my nose.
STANLEY:
Would you like me to have a look?
BLANCHE:Please don't trouble. I think a tissue
would probably do it .... Probably a boogey, I
expect. (p. 165)
Eventually, Mitch, too, gets involved in the examination,
and the three of them stop the plot's thin thread to look
closely and solicitously up Blanche's nose. They finally determine that what they've captured on the tissue looks 'like a
piece of Christmas pudding' (p. 165); then the play continues. The performers use popular and middle-brow culture
as equally fertile resources in Belle Reprieve. Forms such as
vaudeville, burlesque, and conventional drama collide profitably as the production upsets audience expectations about
the proper performance of gender roles and the traditional
circulation of sexual desire.
Singing and dancing punctuate the production's vaudeville routines and dramatic turns. Each performer sings
a song and delivers a monologue, as the play's material is
distributed equally among them. This simple adjustment
disputes realism's tendency to focus on the lead romantic couple and to use subplots to embellish what's typically a story about a man and a woman coming together or
74
.-~-------_
.._-----_
_-_
..
_-------'--_._---
...
breaking apart. In Belle Reprieve, numerous stories replace
the central Stanley-Blanche conflict as the narrative's resolute centre. Stanley and Stella, Stanley and Blanche, and
Mitch and Blanche have their own 'dance breaks', moments
when the performers improvise a few minutes of purely
physical movement that isn't described or recorded in the
script. Suchbreaks havebecome de rigueur in post-modern,
avant-garde theatre., They interrupt the verbal text with a
usually whimsical and nonsensical dance that seems to be
about celebrating everyone's simple presence in the theatre
at that moment. In Belle Reprieve, the dance breaks function
in much the same way. They demonstrate relationships but
also allow spectators to gaze on couples brought together
for non-textual reasons, reasons more about performance
and presence than story.
When Belle Reprieve approaches the climactic rape scene
that prepares for the tragic end of A Streetcar Named Desire,
the painted oversized naked light bulb is pulled across the
stage. But the play doesn't proceed with the usual coerced
seduction scene, in which Stanley is aggressive and crude
and Blanche is fragile and undone; in Belle Reprieve, Stanley
first appears blindfolded and delivers another monologue
(one Shaw later recycled in her solo show Menopausal
Gentleman).
'Don't panic', Shaw/Stanley urges spectators,
as if to undercut the character's threat:
Don't panic ... I was born this way. I didn't
learn it at theatre school. I was born butch. I'm
so queer 1 don't even have to talk about it. It
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¡hellire.,
._---._--
s('xllIlIUy
speaks for itself, it's not funny. Being butch isn't
funny ... don't panie ... I fall to pieces in the night.
I'm just thousands of other parts of other people
all mashed into one body. I am not an original
person. I take all these pieces, snatch them off
the floor before they get swept under the bed,
and I manufacture myself. (p. 177)
Shaw/Stanley reassures the audience by explaining that her
fearsome masculinity is long-standing, constructed, and
queered. She, the butch lesbian playing the furious working_
class man, was 'born this way'. But when Shaw says she was
'born this way', she's referring to a performance of masculinity that's always already external rather than innate.
She manufactures herself from pieces of other people that
seem to fall from herselflike scales from a fish. She becomes
her masculinity by reassembling pieces of cultural detritus,
the representations of gender through whieh she contrives
her own performance. 'Peggy Shaw', she suggests, is no
more real than 'Stanley Kowalski' in Belle Reprieve or in
A Streetcar Named Desire. Any subject of ideology _ fictional
or 'real' - is manufactured by pieces of other people, a hopeful notion that suggests interconnectedness in Our mutually
found representations of our selves. Given such a reassuring
confession, Shaw/Stanley further deconstructs him/herself
and neutralizes the danger that the character represents in
the original play.
In the final prelude to the rape scene, Mitch sings a
song in the style of the Gershwins' 'The Man I Love', to
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----_ ..._-_.-_.~---~-------_._-----------~
which the other characters tap-dance in Chinese lantern
costumes for unexplained reasons. As they dance, the
number begins to fall apart, perhaps because they can't
see out of their outfits. Stage directions indicate, 'The
audience begins to hear them mumbling from under their
costumes' (p. 178):
BLANCHE:Oh, what are we doing? I can't stand
it! I want to be in a real play! ... With real
scenery! White telephones, French windows,
a beginning, a middle and an end! This is the
most confusing show I've ever been in. What's
wrong with red plush? What's wrong with a
theme and a plot we can all follow? ...
STELLA:Now we all talked about this, and we
decided that realism works against us ....
BLANCHE:But I felt better before, I could cope.
AllI had to do was learn my lines and not trip
over the furniture. It was all so clear. And
here we are romping about in the avant-garde
and 1don't know what else. I want my mother
to come and have a good time. She's seventythree for chrissake. You know she's expecting
me to play Romeo before it's too late. What
am J supposed to tell her? That I like being a
drag-queen? She couldn't bear it. I know she
couldn't. She wants me to be in something
realistic, playing a real person with a real job,
like on television. (p. 179)
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•h(·Il.r(1
&: S('xulllH)'
_
With a nod to the critical debates about realism's efficacy, the Pirandello-esque characters discuss their destinies while hidden under Chinese lantern costumes.
Disembodied voices bemoan their fates in the avant-garde.
Bourne/Blanche's funny plaint offers a witty, ironic critique of realism, but the sad truth is that drag queens will
probably never be sanctioned to play real people with real
jobs on TV, let alone to perform as Romeo. Even the few
LGBTQ characters now represented on television in the
USA and the UK are rarely seen as real people with real
jobs. Too often still, they serve as foils for the heterosex_
ual leads, as comic relief pitchers isolated from their own
communities.
Dared by Bourne/Blanche's dissatisfaction, the perform_
ers/characters agree to try realism. Shaw/Stanley goes for
broke: 'He opens [al beer and shakes it, then lets it squirt all
over the stage, then pours some over his head before drinking it' (p. 179). But Bourne/Blanche barely lasts a moment.
As Shaw/Stanley becomes belligerent and physical and won't
let her pass through the room, she asks, 'Do we have to play
this scene?' (p. 180). As Stanley continues, Blanche takes off
one of her heels and threatens him. Stanley grabs her arm:
STANLEY:
Drop the stiletto!
BLANCHE:You think I'm crazy or something?
STANLEY:If you want to be in this play, you've
got to drop the stiletto.
BLANCHE:If you want to be in this play you've
got to make me!
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._
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STANLEY:If you want to play a woman, the
woman in this play gets raped and goes crazy
in the end.
BLANCHE:I don't want to get raped and go crazy.
I just wanted to wear a nice frock, and look at
the shit they've given me! (p. 181)
Happily, Stella and Mitch intervene to pull the proceedings off
track once again. They sing to Blanche and Stanley, reuniting
the contentedly misbegotten couples.
Weaver/Stella ends Belle Reprieve with a coda reminiscent of Shakespeare's comedies. She asks the audience
directly, 'Did you figure it out yet? Who's who, what's what,
who gets what, where the toaster is plugged in? Did you get
what you wanted?' (p, 182). But in this case, the story to
unravel is told not just by words, but by the multiple, sometimes conflicting, contradictory, madcap, seriocomic, and
sad narratives of gender, sexuality, and theatre written on
these queer actors' bodies in performance. The play ends
with an encore called 'I Love My Art':
I love the glamour, I love the drama,
I love I love I love my art
I love the glamour, I love the drama
I love I love I love my art. (p. 183)
Through artifice and camp, and by mining and then parodying
Western theatre traditions from Shakespeare to the present,
Belle Reprieve plays with gender and sexuality, undoing the
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jllclllre & l.icxunllj)'
_
dubious claim that our identities are natural or that we don't
perform ourselves offstage as much as we do on.
New audiences: no longer preaching to the choir
represents only one kind of queer approach to
theatre and performance, one that uses 'queer' in its verb
form to deconstruct the legacy of drama that once made
non-normative sexualities invisible (if not explicitly forbidden and demeaned). Although the play relies on spectators'
knowledge of Williams' original to 'get' the performers'
insertion of LGBTQ material, the performance also exemplifies the refusal to pin down sexual identity as singular
and fixed that characterizes much queer theatre in the UK
and the USAi While such post-modernist performance continues to find audiences who revel in its irreverent flouting
of traditional theatre and conventional gender and sexuality
roles, other LGBTQ performance creates a more realist and
realistic archive of stories and experiences that reflect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer identities from
bounded communities in different geographical locations.
The myth of a transcendent LGBTQ community no longer
pertains, since political representation and popular cultural
Belle Reprieve
images in the twenty-first century regularly demonstrate
the diversity of our various lives, dreams, and desires.
This proliferation of performance styles, forms, contents,
and audiences allows LGBTQ theatre to move into the next era
of its development. Some explicitly gay-, leshian-, or queeridentified venues remain active, including the long-lived
Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco and Theatre Offensive
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